


a homecoming

by borage (haechansheaven)



Series: oikawa week 2020 [6]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Birthday, Canon Compliant, Day 6: The best way to celebrate, M/M, Oikawa Week 2020, Post-Canon, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:15:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25402927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haechansheaven/pseuds/borage
Summary: Before he goes, Tooru tells Hajime that he wants to play against him, for real, one day, and Hajime laughs and laughs and laughs before saying, “Yeah. One day, when we’re old and gray, let’s play again.”
Relationships: Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Series: oikawa week 2020 [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1832464
Comments: 4
Kudos: 48
Collections: Oikawa Week 2020





	a homecoming

**Author's Note:**

> for oikawa week, day 6: the best way to celebrate
> 
> happy birthday, oikawa!
> 
> **notes** : it is, kind of canon compliant. please just humor me.

The thing about coming back home after a long, long time, is that some part of your brain expects that nothing has changed. To Tooru, Miyagi feels strange and foreign now—a place unknown. He’s seen pictures and heard stories, but none of it is like being here, in person, to examine the differences on his own.

And some of them aren’t even that big of changes. Tooru can count how many things he notices on a first pass on two hands. It’s the longer he’s here, the more he realizes that nothing is the same.  
It feels sort of like high school when he descends the stairs and sees Hajime at the kitchen table with his mother. His back is broader, now, though, his posture more self-assured. He used to hunch a lot, Tooru thinks. Now he sits tall, like he was always supposed to. But, for all the things that have changed, the way Hajime turns and smiles at him, his good morning a little awkward, hasn’t.

This is the first time, in a long time, that Tooru is home for his birthday. He can’t count, anymore, the number of times he’s wished on a candle or a star or an eyelash to be home for his birthday, in this quiet house in Miyagi, with Hajime by his side. Again.

There’s a stack of pancakes, and Hajime is laughing at a story Tooru bets he’s heard a thousand times, and Tooru thinks that, right, this is what being home always felt like. Even if things have changed, the way that Tooru felt never has.

When Hajime turns around, eyes crinkled as he smiles, Tooru thinks that he doesn’t really mind being home. He thought, for a while, that things would feel foreign and he would feel out of place and the world would feel upside-down, but, in the end, so long as Hajime is here, there is nothing strange about being here, in Miyagi, in Japan.

And of course things are different. They’re standing on a opposite sides of a different stage now, though this is still his Hajime smiling up at him as he pulls a chair out from the table and takes a seat; this is still his Hajime who wishes him a happy birthday and asks him what he wants—that he’ll do anything except hand him a win; this is his Hajime who holds his hand under the table, thumb brushing across his knuckles with care.

Tooru’s mother—and Hajime’s mother, too, who will arrive once the pancakes are gone and Tooru and Hajime are laughing at old home videos—wishes him a happy birthday and a, “I don’t know what else I can give you but my love.” Tooru thinks that the love from a person is worth more than material things.  
He still likes having Hajime nearby, though. And it’s funny, because the Hajime he remembers and the Hajime of now are so nicely overlapping that the way he casually runs his palm over Tooru’s knee and comments on how the muscles feel firmer, the way that he squeeze’s Tooru’s wrist and says it feels stronger; they all feel like plain old, normal Hajime things.

The home movies are a reminder of how things have changed, though. Paired with the messages from teammates of the past and present and other realities—messages that say, Happy birthday, and Feliz cumpleaños filling his inbox—and the Argentinian passport in his bag, Tooru realizes that he’s not the same. No one is, though. That’s the natural progress of time, after all.

This is his home in the sense of spirit and history. It binds him to the most important people in his life and reminds him of his origin. If this is his last birthday here, he thinks that he wouldn’t really mind. Here, with Hajime, and the people who he loves the most, make up for all the wishes he made to come back here and relive eighteen years of frustrating memories.

It’s a quiet day, really, only because Tooru still has a practice attend and, right, Hajime does too. When it comes to saying a good bye, even for a short while, Tooru has always been quite terrible at it. Hajime, in response, props his chin up with a gentle touch and reminds him to square his shoulders and smile because there are plenty of people who are placing their bets on him and his success—even Hajime, who looks at him with the feeling of a quick-burning fire from across the court. Top of Form

Before he goes, Tooru tells Hajime that he wants to play against him, for real, one day, and Hajime laughs and laughs and laughs before saying, “Yeah. One day, when we’re old and gray, let’s play again.”

Tooru is twenty-seven and staring into the face of people who have changed the trajectory of his world for the better. He still isn’t sure how to say it properly, so he hugs Shoyou, commenting on how they’ve finally come to stand on this stage together, before turning to Tobio and saying, “This was sort of fated, wasn’t it?” And Tobio had smiled—a nice, genuine smile that Tooru wants to earn—and said, “Right. We’re supposed to be here.”

At the end of it all, no matter what, Tooru thinks that this game will be his favorite. Sure, the world is watching, but none of that means anything if his most important people aren’t, either. Issei shoots him a funny message that evening, telling him he hasn’t changed, he just looks _older_ , and Takahiro sends a photo of him with temporary tattoos of Argentina’s flags on his cheeks. Shigeru’s message is short and succinct and so _him_ , and even Kentarou sends him a, _It’s good to see you_ , message.

Some of the faces on the other side of the court are unfamiliar and that night, staring at the ceiling of a temporary place, Tooru wonders if he would have known them if he ever got to stand on the national stage. There’s no take-backs though, and, in the end, he carried himself to the top, regardless of all the things that continued to stand in his way. Tooru has never been one to accept criticism, after all. Instead he picks it apart and takes the important parts and _learns_ them until there’s nothing left, and he can take another step towards the future.

On his bedside table, his phone rings, and he doesn’t even have to look at the name to know it’s Hajime. The ringtone he asked Tooru to choose is kind of silly, and he feels himself grow how at the memories of his teammates hearing it for the first time, but it’s so very _Hajime_ that Tooru doesn’t hold him too accountable. He’s the one who set it after Hajime asked, after all.

“Hello?”

“ _Did you stretch properly?_ ” is Hajime’s first question, followed up with a, “ _Good job out there, by the way._ ”

“Yes, I stretched properly,” grumbles Tooru, turning over in bed. “And thanks. No big injuries today. You didn’t have much to do, huh?”

“ _I like it that way. It means that everyone’s in good shape._ ”

The conversation is quick to fizzle into silence, and Tooru listens carefully to the sound of Hajime’s television in the background. It’s some late-night talk show, and it’s in English, so Tooru figures that it’s a re-run. How like Hajime, he thinks. The silence is heavenly, though, in a way that he’s missed in Argentina. The silences between him and Hajime are like those that would blossom in the blanket forts they made as children in Tooru’s living room.

Knowing that he and Hajime are standing on the same sort of stage is different from actually seeing it with his own two eyes.

“ _Is your knee okay?_ ”

“You worry more than my mom,” Tooru teases, hoping that Hajime can hear him smile.

(Hajime can, because he _knows_ Tooru better than anyone else in the world, except maybe his parents, and even then it’s a close one.)

“ _It’s perfectly valid. I’m a_ trainer _, you know. I worry about the health of athletes. Now, answer me. Is your knee okay?_ ”

Tooru snorts. There’s never any beating around the bush with Hajime. Maybe that’s why Tooru does. “Geeze, Iwa,” whines Tooru. “Is that any way to talk to a member of Argentina’s Olympic team?”

“ _… Maybe I should just hang up and try this another time._ ”

He won’t, though, because it’s rare that they’re in the same time zone, in the same place, on the same path. This is the first time, in a long time, that they’ve crossed trajectories. They’ve been running parallel to one another for years now, an eye on one another, waiting for a collision. Today they got what they had been waiting for.

“My knee is okay,” admits Tooru. It’s honest, and a little hesitant, because the pain won’t ever disappear. There are phantom sensations here and there that are tied to visions of the memory, and Tooru isn’t really sure how to make those go away. “I did _everything_ my physical therapist told me to do after games. Don’t you worry.”

“ _Of course I’m gonna worry. This is_ you _we’re talkin’ about. You’ve always been a really bad liar, but you’ve always been worse at taking care of yourself_.”

This is what it’s like to be known, seen, understood. Hajime has always been good at reminding Tooru that he’s not some irreplaceable god that will live for forever. He’s always been good at watching and letting Tooru fall on his own, though never forgetting to hold out a hand if he wants to take it. There are years and years and years between them that Tooru likes holding in his hands and flipping through, reliving them second by second.

“Yeah,” Tooru knocks his feet together under the covers and he feels twenty and new to a foreign country again. “You’re not wrong.”

“ _Of course I’m not! I_ know _you!_ ”

When they are old, and their hair is turning gray, Tooru will turn to Hajime and think that celebrating his birthday at home is still just as nice. Hajime will turn around in his chair and wish him a happy birthday like he always does. A stack of pancakes, freshly made, will sit on the table, and they’ll eat them together and talk about life, like they always do. Every step of the future has Hajime there, as a constant that he can always plug into an equation.

It isn’t that Tooru will never feel lonely, and that he’ll never be alone, but Hajime sort of fits himself into those moments, as well. He isn’t sure how to explain it.

“What the hell’re you thinkin’ about?” Hajime asks, kicking his thigh. The couch is a tight squeeze, and Tooru pinches Hajime’s ankle in retribution. “You’re spacin’ out the same way you do when you think about a play you made.”

Tooru Oikawa is twenty-seven, and he thinks that his life has all lead up to this, in a pleasant sort of way. Japan is still his home, though it really is wherever Hajime ends up. “Only _you_ would know that, Iwa,” he teases, shouting when he’s kicked off the couch. “What are you, twelve?”

“That’s my line!”

Tooru reaches out and grabs Hajime by the ankle, pulling him to the ground with a loud thud. They wrestle one another like they’re kids again until Hajime is laughing, body laid across Tooru’s, arms wrapped around his neck. He’s sure that wherever Hajime is dictates what his home is. Today it is here, in Tokyo, where the whole entire world knows both of their names, describes them as the star-crossed teammates even if Tooru thinks that _lovers_ is fine, too.

“You should come to Argentina,” says Tooru, all quiet, and Hajime snorts.

“As if I haven’t thought about that before.”

“And?”

Hajime sits up, eyes shining, before he laughs this good, full laugh that makes Tooru think of stomping through streams to catch crayfish at seven years old and watching the fireworks from the playground. “I want to stand across from you a few more times before I stand beside you again. It’s inevitable, anyways, that I’m gonna be by your side again sometime in the future, right?”

When Tooru thinks about it, he agrees. There’s something inevitable to their existence beside one another, that he’s never doubted that Hajime would be there in the end. Curling his hand against Hajime’s wrist, he nods. “You’re right.”

“One of these days, I’ll play against you with my own two hands, even if it’s just a local pick up match,” Hajime says, “and I’ll pummel you into the ground!”

Laughing, Tooru can’t wait. “I’ll be waiting for you, then.”

When they are old, and their hair is turning gray, and Tooru has more time to think about things than he should have, Hajime will take him by the hand and remind him of warm summer nights that didn’t have a breeze, jumping across creeks to get to the forest to watch fireflies trail after one another between the trees. Hajime will be an indication of freedom, like he has always been, and Tooru will remember that, right, beside Hajime, he is home.


End file.
